Terrorists ‘twist words of Qur’an’

A close Muslim friend of Pope Francis has urged the West not to play into the hands of Islamic State militants by believing that their acts of terror are part of a religious war, writes Hannah Roberts.

Dr Omar Abboud, who accompanied Francis on his trip to the Holy Land earlier this year, said that to respond to violence spreading through Iraq and Syria as if it were a religious war would be a “terrible mistake”, insisting: “Either you are a terrorist or you are Muslim. You cannot be both.”

In an interview in the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, the former secretary general of the Islamic Centre of Argentina, a friend of Francis from his Buenos Aires days, said the terrorists recruit by “twisting the words of the Qur’an, turning it into an ideology they use to fulfil their own interests rooted in money and power”.